uprooted #1-13, 2023-2024

Archival pigment print, 16x16" (7 round) and 24x34" (6 rectangular)

After two decades of drought, California faced bomb cyclones and atmospheric rivers in early 2023. This series of color photographs, made at The Sea Ranch on the Sonoma coast where I live, pays homage to the more than 1,000 fallen trees and their upended visible roots. Inspired by Goethe’s color theory and the notion that “light exists within darkness,” I use the negative image as a conceptual strategy to reveal a world normally hidden from sight. Like an X-ray, the inverted palette—its shifting blues shaped by light and shadow on soil and exposed roots—renders the unseen visible. These “reversed hues” and their altered spectrum raise philosophical questions about how we perceive color and, by extension, the world around us. Uprooted evokes an entropic state of being pulled from the ground, bridging macro and micro, darkness and light, above and below. When the massive foundation of a tree is laid bare, we glimpse the psychic life of an otherwise unseen world. The work invites viewers to reconsider the reality of climate change and the forces—environmental and personal—that shape our movements and transformations.